Harry Haun

With 'God’s Own Country,' his first outing as a writer and director, Francis Lee manfully and ambitiously set out to scale an English 'Brokeback Mountain,' succeeding so well he is now coming down the other side with a wheelbarrow full of festival trophies.

Todd Haynes must thrive in past tense. All seven of his films are period pieces, he takes pleasure in pointing out, and his latest—Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios’ 'Wonderstruck'—is no different.

Like George Stevens and Jack Cardiff before him, Nicolas Roeg was a director of photography before he was a director, so his way of visualizing a story—painting pictures with the camera—hasn’t changed beyond hiring cameramen to execute it....

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope surrendered their American Express Travel cards 55 years ago with their seventh and last “Road” movie—advertised “to Hong Kong,” that road actually went to the Moon—but the two-for-the-road formula has continued to rack up cinematic miles as a viable construct. The latest case in point is 'The Journey,' a short 50-mile hop from Edinburgh to Belfast but a huge leap for Northern Ireland.

“Thank you, Film Society of Lincoln Center, home of my favorite uptown films,” quipped its 44th annual honoree Robert De Niro pointedly on May 8 after a long film-clip homage to the co-founder (maybe even godfather) of downtown’s Tribeca Film Festival, which just concluded its own 15th cinematic celebration nine days earlier.

In his five features to date, James Gray has rarely ventured far—if at all—from the five boroughs of his native New York City. “I’m genetically engineered to be an accountant in a shtetl,” glibly confesses the 48-year-old writer-director responsible for 'Little Odessa,' 'The Yards,' 'We Own the Night,' 'Two Lovers' and 'The Immigrant.'